New Polls Point To Good News For Obama

In the latest CNN "poll of polls" conducted March 26 through Saturday, Sen. Hillary Clinton holds a 7-percentage point lead over Sen. Barack Obama -- 49 percent to 42 percent in Pennsylvania. Nine percent remain unsure, the surveys found.

That gap is 4 percentage points narrower than a similar CNN poll of polls conducted March 26 through Wednesday. In that average, Clinton led the senator from Illinois 51 percent to 40 percent. Nine percent also were unsure then.

Also breaking today, in the national Democratic race Barack Obama has opened up a nine-point national lead over Hillary Clinton, according to the latest Gallup Poll.

The poll notes that the Clinton's released their tax statements Friday, and that the Mark Penn (Top Clinton Campaign Stretegist) mini-scandal might have affected the numbers.

But it's not all good news for the Freshman Senator. One in 10 voters believes Barack Obama is Muslim, a mistaken impression that lingers across party lines. In a poll released March 26, 14 percent of Republicans, 10 percent of Democrats and 8 percent of independents mistakenly identified him as Muslim, according to a survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. Just over half of each group correctly identified him as Christian, while about a third said they don’t know his religion.

My Take: These polls come at a time where Team Clinton are making unforced errors almost at a daily and in some cases hourly pace. However, I don't suspect the erroneous statements and missteps to continue very much longer as, contrary to my opinion of her as a person, she's proven to be a far more astute politician more often during this nomination process than not (Remember Ohio). But you have to consider the scenario that she just can't close the deal, as much as people have tried to stigmatize Barack with the dubious attribute. Fox News has been trying to bury Obama with false Madrassa stories for months and since mid-'07 have been pumping that Jeremiah Wright story almost daily before the rest of the media investigated it extensively last month and as that narrative almost spun out of control at it's height last month Clinton still couldn't use that Obama hit to take advantage of this perceived vulnerability and sneak in the driver's seat of this race and bring everything home. For all the things breaking for her in her favor she's still managed to imagine fabricated stories of gunfire like some two-bit hip-hop artist severely damaging her credibility as experienced and seasoned in foreign affairs and bringing into question her honesty which voters, even those who back her, often question. You can't go from being up 20+ percentage points in early March in Pennsylvania after Texas & Ohio and have this kind meteoric drop in the polls with little more than 2 weeks left before the primary there. This has to point to her incompetence if not downright inability to take outright control over the campaign.

What really bothers me though is why people still believe Obama is a Muslim. You could make the assumption I guess that those numbers are from the fringe nutjob sectors of the voting electorate on both sides. You know the kind of internet conspiracy theorists that think and mold their beliefs counter to conventional wisdom just for the sake of rebelling against logic and fact so they can walk around with an increased sense of self-worth and perceived intellect. What more could Obama do about them though? How you can take a hit from the so called Jeremiah Wright scandal that took place in a Christian church he's attended for 20 years and still be seen as a Muslim is beyond me. I suspect that this percentage of nutjobs wouldn't vote for Obama in any circumstance any way and this might give them their excuse to write him off without being looked at s prejudiced [which in and of itself is ridiculous to begin with seeing how unfairly characterizing Islam as somehow bad/evil or disqualifying as a character trait for someone serious at vying for government office is the very nature of prejudice.] It's unfortunate though if recent presidential election history is any precursor to how this election is going to be that he'll be starting off in the whole without 10% of the national electorate on his side because of the misnomer that he is a Muslim.